Barcode scanner based line follower

Brody thought it was high time we featured another robot project and directed us to his site: bfrdesign.com. For his line follower bot he used an old barcode scanner he found cheap at a junk shop. The scanner has a 2088 pixel ccd linear image sensor. Several red LEDs are used to illuminate the image and the data is fed to an ATmega8. The wheels are then driven using two Sanwa servos modified for continuous rotation. He’s got a couple other projects on the site and I’m sure we’ll see more in the future.

A couple of weeks ago, I was at a robotics festival where some elementary school group brought in a line-following robot. “Oh great, another line-following robot,” I thought as I rolled my eyes. And then, it shot a bean-bag in my general direction with its air-compressed cannon.

hehe… cue-cat. I have a few modded ones hanging around @#6: you can modify them into a general purpose barcode reader.

I got this really great DVD cataloging software, you just swipe the barcode and it downloaded all the info about the disc to a local searchable database. I though it was a good excuse to find a cue cat and mod it. So I did, come to find out the software worked with unmoded cuecats too :d’oh:

Any RPI people in here? oddly enough I’m wearing my LITEC 20th Anniversary invitational Polo right now. (for those who don’t know it’s a competition to build a fancy line reading robot) I took first place overall that year too ^_^

You aren’t the first to ask that question :-) the bot looks for the centre of the ‘line’. if there’s a fork it just heads down the middle until one of the lines drops off the sensor or they meet up again. It stops if it can’t find a line (this feature has prevented many a fall off the table). I have some really, really tiny sensors from work (how’s 5mm?) that I might use next time.